Few can still be unaware that 1980 in Britain is as much the Year of the Viking as of forest fires, record interest-rates and the SAS. There is, for once, no ostensible centenary reason for this,...
The great virtue of the orphan story, I believe, and the reason why it has survived for so many centuries and will continue to do so, is that, when it comes to essentials, we are solitary beings; we are...
Language, logic, style – these are usually thought to be aspects to wind up a review with, concerned as they are with the secondary ‘how’ rather than the primary...
Professor Stanford, who this year retires from the Regius Chair of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin after 40 years in office, feels that ‘creative literature is being used more and more as...
Anthony Summers’s argument is remarkably simple. There is a tape-recording of the gunfire which killed President Kennedy. The third and fourth shots are too close together to have come from...
When the Archduchess Joanna of Austria made her official entry into Florence on 16 December 1565 as the bride of Francesco de’ Medici, one of the first things she saw, at the gate of the...
‘Generationalism’, as Mr Wohl designates the practice of thinking about history and society in terms of the characteristics attributed, usually by themselves, to members of particular...
Historians are subject to a peculiar occupational hazard. Not only must they, like other scholars and scientists, leave no stone unturned until they have reached a satisfying conclusion to...
These five books, all published in the second half of 1979, are very good evidence for the established place of Roman history in contemporary English-speaking culture and (even more) education....
G.M. Trevelyan (1876-1962) burnt all his papers. His ‘Autobiography of an Historian’ (1949) is as the title suggests both narrow and concise. The sketch by a pupil, J.H. Plumb,...
The well-nigh drug-like fascination which Vienna has exerted upon the Western world at all emotional and intellectual levels – Johann Strauss’s as well as Arnold Schoenberg’s,...
This book is based on one of the most thorough of 19th-century government inquiries, the six volumes of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law (Scotland) of 1844. The Commission had,...
To be truly a Master is to have authority. To claim to be a Master is to claim to possess authority. We can be confident that more persons claim to have authority than do truly have it. What is...
It is the historians of military events and strategical planning who have all the fun. Whereas those who study the political or economic past are confined to a discussion and analysis of the...
The city of Hangchow, in the 13th century, was transfixed by food.
Any conventional account of the last decade would include these among its headlines: – The decline in American world leadership and the expansion of Soviet power and influence. Vietnam,...
As life must be possible before it can be pleasant, human health and its relation to survival and population growth are among the great themes of history. Why did early man, although apparently...
The Habsburg monarchy two decades before its total collapse might seem an odd source to go to for contemporary political solutions. But it is to that period, and above all to the writings of the...